1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to methods and systems for a customer to request manufacture of a product by fabrication organization. More particularly this invention relates to a customer requesting fabrication of an integrated circuit on a substrate by a semiconductor foundry. Even more particularly, this invention relates to transmission of a service request with a computer aided design data from a customer to the foundry.
2. Description of Related Art
The design of a product involves not only defining the form and function of the product, but also the various tools and templates necessary to manufacture the product must be defined. Further, the various process steps must be enumerated to detail the procedure for manufacture from the raw material to the finished product. A set of design instructions is necessary to define the physical structure of any templates employed in the manufacture of the product.
In present organizational structures, the design organization is often separate from the manufacturing organization. In many instances, the designing organization is a corporate entity separate from the manufacturing organization. The design organization may not have or may not wish to invest the necessary capital to acquire and maintain the necessary equipment to manufacture a product.
As the design organization has become more remote from the manufacturing organization and the equipment of manufacture has become more automated, the communication of the design information must become more standardized and must comply with certain rules of format and syntax. In the electronic industry, design organizations communicate with manufacturing organization with a service request and a “tape-out”. The service request defines the types of masks or templates required to define the layers of an integrated circuit and the process routing as the product or substrate to fabricated to integrated circuits proceeds through the factory or semiconductor foundry. The “tape-out” defines the instructions for fabricating the templates or masks. Presently, these instructions for fabricating the masks are encoded as digital data transferred through communication networks.
A customer engineering representative acts as an interface between the design organization and the manufacturing organization to provide the necessary process definitions, design rules, and the format and syntax rules to allow the design organization the ability to correctly translate their product design to data in the format and syntax necessary to permit the manufacturing organization to fabricate the product. The design organization transfers this design data to the manufacturing organization. The customer engineering representative reviews the service request and validates that the types of tools and templates (masks) are correctly identified. The customer engineering representative then reviews the service request to ensure that the process steps are correctly defined and the work-in-process product is correctly controlled. Finally, the customer engineer then examines the data defining the templates to determine that the data complies with the rules for the format and syntax.
Any errors encountered during this process are sufficient reason to reject the request. The customer must then be informed and correct any of the errors. If the errors are minor, the customer engineering representative may correct the errors. This often requires manual entry of the information that is prone to error.
Refer now to FIG. 1 for a description of the transfer of a service request for fabrication of an integrated circuit on a substrate. The procedures of the processing are divided into the three phases. The customer preparation phase 10 has the customer (design organization) creating the design with the service request including the “tape-out” structure of the masks required for the fabrication. The customer 12 issues (Box 14) the service request, which is stored and retained (Box 16) as a draft. The initial draft of the service request is then submitted and transferred (Box 18) to the manufacturing organization for processing. The customer engineering representative is responsible for the review and verification phase 20. Receipt of the service request is acknowledged (Box 22) by the customer engineering representative. The service request is then verified (Box 24) for the correct format and syntax. The customer engineering representative must review the service request to insure that the process tools and masks for the various processing steps are correctly identified, that the process steps and handling instructions comply with the process capabilities of the manufacturing organization and that any special handling instructions are identified and emphasized for the fabrication organization. Finally the data of the mask layers is reviewed for correct format and syntax. If there are previous versions of the product, the masks are checked against the previous versions to identify the difference and check that the differences are correct.
The verification procedure (Box 24) is then checked (Box 26) for errors. If the errors are severe, the service request (Box 27) is rejected and returned to the customer 12 for recreation. If the errors are minor, the service request is modified (Box 28) by the customer engineering representative, with the results transferred to the customer 12 for verification. Upon verification of the modification or if the service request is correct initially, the service request is submitted (Box 32) to the fabrication organization for manufacture. The manufacture phase 30 is performed by the production control (PC) unit 36 that controls scheduling of the manufacture, the fabrication engineering 36, which details the necessary processes and their attendant tooling, and the mask tooling group 34, which are responsible for the generation of the masks from the tape-out data. The successful completion of the service request with the tape-out data allows expeditious fabrication of the integrated circuit on a substrate.
Traditionally the efforts of the customer engineering representative are manual and any modifications to the service request require tedious labor-intensive entry of any modifications (Box 28).
U.S. Pat. No. 6,182,124 (Lau, et al.) describes a token-based deadline enforcement system for electronic document submission. The token-based deadline enforcement system for electronic document submission, a submission requirements center collects information on submission requirements (e.g., deadlines for submitting bids in response to commercial tenders), from the processing environments that generate the requirements. A gateway to a network of potential submitters polls the information collected in the submission requirements center, and generates tokens corresponding to current submission time limits. These tokens are available to all potential submitters until expiration of the corresponding time limit for the submission. On receiving a request for electronic submission from a submitting program, the gateway searches its records for the token corresponding to the submission type. If the token is located, it is returned to the submitting program for packaging with the submission. If the token is not located, an electronic message, such as an error flag, is returned to the submitting program, and the submitter knows immediately that the submission did not meet the deadline. When a submission packaged with a valid token is received at the gateway, it can be routed directly to the processing environment that generated the submission requirement The valid token provides an on-time validity check; the receiving processing environment does not have to check the submission as it arrives to ensure that it has been filed on time, but can delay processing to a convenient time, to verify compliance with substantive requirements for filing the submission. This scheme provides the submitter with immediate feedback whether the submission has been accepted for filing within the deadline. Possible performance problems in trying to process “time of filing” for a large number of submissions filed virtually simultaneously as the submission deadline draws near, are avoided. Also, the submitter is saved network access costs in waiting for a verification of filing to be returned.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,180,293 (Tanaka, et al.) describes a mask pattern preparing method used for forming a desired pattern on a substrate to be exposed. The method allows correction of pattern data on a substrate employing a device such as an electron beam writing device to allow direct writing of the features of a substrate.